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Homeschoolers on to College: What Research Shows Us
Journal of College Admission, Fall 2004 by Ray, Brian D
Susannah Sheffer (1995) talked with homeschooled adolescent girls moving into adulthood. Sheffer began her report by citing the work of Carol Gilligan and her colleagues in the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development who, lamenting, "have written about girls' 'loss of voice' and increasing distrust of their own perceptions." Sheffer suggested that the great difference in structure and function-the way things work, the relationships people have, expected behaviors, and the roles people play-between homeschooling and conventional schooling may have explained why she found so many of these home-educated adolescents to have not lost their voice and sense of identity. Meredith, a 14-year-old in Sheffer's study, said, "I was worried that I would become a typical teenager if I went to school" and "I think some people would have seen [school] as my opportunity to 'be like everybody else.' But I didn't want to be like everybody else." Sheffer concluded, "Throughout this book the homeschooled girls I've interviewed have echoed these statements. They have talked about trusting themselves, pursuing their own goals, maintaining friendships even when their friends differ from them or disagree with them." Finally, these home-educated girls maintain their self-confidence as they pass into womanhood.
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Sheffer's findings regarding adolescent girls might explain some of the successes that other researchers have found, regarding young adults who were homeschooled. In a study that categorized college students as either home, public or private schooled, and examined their aptitude for achievement in college English, Galloway and Sutton (1995) found that homeschooled students demonstrated similar academic preparedness for college and similar academic achievement in college as students who had attended conventional schools. In a similar vein, Oliveira, Watson and Sutton (1994) found that home-educated college students had a slightly higher overall mean critical thinking score than did students from public schools, Christian schools, and ACE [private] schools but the differences were not statistically significant.
Similarly, Jones and Gloeckner (2004) cited three studies (Gray, 1998; Jenkms, 1998; Mexcur, 1993) as showing the home-educated to be performing as well or better than institutional-school graduates at the college level. Jones and Gloeckner, in their own study, concluded, "The academic performance analyses indicate that home school graduates i are as ready for college as traditional high school graduates and that they perform as well on national college assessment tests as traditional high school graduates" (20).
ACTs and SATs are the best-known test predictors of success in university or college in America. Both the SAT and ACT publishers have reported for several years that the scores of the homeschooled are higher, on average, than those from public schools. For example, for the 1999-2000 school year, the home-educated scored an average of 568 in verbal while the state-school (i.e., public-school) average was 501, and 532 in math while the state-school average was 510 (Barber, 2001).
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